Another week, another ScreenShot Saturday and another dev update.
This was a challenging week. We love our in-house projects, but our bread and butter is our work for clients. Sometimes that means that our in-house projects like lose resources because a client project goes into crunch time. That happened to us this past week on . Art and level design continued as normal, but we got very little done on the programming or gameplay side.
The most tangible progress this week (that I’m allowed to show) was the Hangar Control room. This room acts, basically, as the nerve center for the hangar bay, serving as both Ground Control and Flight Control. Up until recently, it wasn’t much more than a few cubes, but now it’s really starting to take shape.
http://3.t.imgbox.com/lDezamAr.jpg http://5.t.imgbox.com/t436A9er.jpg
We realized this week, that GDC is just around the corner. Yikes! We’ve decided to really focus on the hangar level from now until GDC. For the last few months, we’ve been spreading work across several levels as we iterated. For the conference, we want one level at a higher visual fidelity so that we can demo it. If all goes according to plan, I’ll have Hangar Bay loaded on an iPad or three while I’m out there, so if you’re at GDC and want to see on device, ping us on Twitter during the conference:
We did a lot of concepting work this week, but I wasn’t able to convince our artists to share any of that yet. I should have some of that to share in the next week, though, and I’m still holding out hope that I’ll be able to follow up in a little bit with at least one bit of concept art today or tomorrow. Call it Screenshot Saturday Part 2 (or Screenshot Sunday).
Starting next week, we should also start having higher-resolution, normal mapped, and textured models showing up in this level.
Like last week, I’m sneaking in a bonus PIE image that my artists haven’t signed off on. Last week, we threw a whole bunch of bots onto the Hangar level to test performance (worked great except on oldest supported iOS devices). Walking into the hangar substructure and having 15 glowing bots look at you and then start chasing you is actually kind of a surreal experience. If you’re fast, you can get through the swam and get away, but if you dawdle, you’re quickly surrounded by bots and unable to move.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), our AI doesn’t know how to shoot or go up stairs yet, so you only have to make it to the stair hub to be safe, then you can taunt the bots all you want.